Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

No Headline

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

Tenant Rights in a Sale Question: I am the leaseholder on a town house in a rent-stabilized complex that includes five apartments and three town houses. Access to the units is from an interior courtyard connected to the street by an enclosed passageway. All units are served by a common heating hot-water system. I believe that the entire complex is registered as a single lot for tax purposes.

Now the landlord is installing individual heating and hot-water units in the town houses to make them functionally independent. He says he intends to sell them but that the sale will not be a co-op conversion so that it will be possible for someone to buy a town house and take it for his own use when the tenant's lease expires. Can the complex be legally split like this? If so, could a new owner refuse to renew our lease? R. C., Manhattan Answer: Certain types of residential properties that are or can be made to be functionally independent, like town houses and garden apartments, can be separated. Owners who want to separate them and have rent-stabilization status removed must apply to the state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal. According to Thomas R. Viola, a spokesman for the agency, the division takes into consideration the property's mechanical system, its certificate of occupancy and the property-owner's record as a landlord when determining if the application is to be granted.

If the request for a change in status is granted, he said, tenants of these units would not lose their rent-stabilization protections such as the right to renewal leases. ''The owner would be able to occupy or rent the residence only after the stabilized tenants vacate it on their own,'' said Mr. Viola. A MORTGAGE IN IRELAND Question: I work in New York but spend my summers and Christmas in my home in Ireland. I own a one-quarter interest in a house there and my brother and sisters, who also live abroad, own the other three-quarters. I now want to buy the house from them but American banks will not offer me a mortgage and the Irish Central Bank will not allow an Irish bank to give mortgages to nonresidents. Is there any way around this? . . . D. R., Manhattan Answer: Probably not. David L. Smith, a real estate attorney in Manhattan whose firm has an office in Paris, said that most American banks are not willing to take mortgages on property outside the United States because they cannot protect their investments. ''If something were to happen they would not be able to foreclose,'' said Mr. Smith.

He suggested that the only alternative might be to work with an Irish bank that has an operation in New York. Such a bank might be able to help you get around the residency rule since you spend part of your year in Ireland and you are not looking to buy property but to get a mortgage for a house you already own in part. TERRACE OR BALCONY? Question: I have noticed that in some advertisements for co-ops and condominiums sponsors say some apartments have terraces while the accompanying information and photographs that make it clear that these so-called terraces are in fact balconies. Is it considered a fraud for sponsors to call a balcony a terrace? Is there any govenment agency with responsiblity to prevent this misrepresentation? . . . T. N., Manhattan Answer: The State Attorney General's office, the agency responsible for monitoring sales and advertisments for condominiums and cooperative plans, considers the terms to be interchangable.